


island sovereigns

by bugsuit



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Desert Island, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:25:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bugsuit/pseuds/bugsuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sea and the sky don't touch until the horizon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spikes and stings

_harley_

Your name is Jade Harley, and you are stuck on a deserted island with exactly the wrong person to be stuck with on a deserted island. __

Right now, you’re sitting on an outcrop of rock and thinking about how you got into this mess. You’re fairly certain it’s no one’s fault, and if anything that just makes it worse because there’s no one to blame. Sometimes you like to tell yourself it’s his fault, because you hate him a whole lot (but not like that!) and sometimes it’s nice to blame things on people you don’t like, even if they had nothing to do with the problem.

The long and short of it is that you played a game with your friends, and it turned out to be a disaster – and then when you were sure you’d salvaged it, you (and only you, not counting this one douchebag) fell from the sky and landed on a lonely little island in the middle of the ocean.

You’re stuck, now, and you try not to think about whether or not the others are okay because sometimes when you think about them too much your heart starts to ache and you start to be afraid that they didn’t land quite as softly as you did, or that some of the fauna got to them, or…

You cut that thought out before it gets any further, and you just focus on the feeling of the cold rock beneath your hands and feet instead.

He’s been waiting back on the shore for a while now, pacing up and down and kicking at shells and bits of coral. You can hear the sound of his shoes on the sand if you listen.

You’ll make him wait a little longer. You used to be surprised that he’d wait for you to come to him, but now you’ve figured out why. You’re pretty sure he’s afraid of you, and he should be! You yelled at him the other day, really loud and for a full minute (you think), and he looked absolutely mortified by the end of it and let you storm off on your own. So he’s learned to wait for you, to let you have your moments alone.

Even though it’s not technically alone if he’s mooching around behind you somewhere.

Eventually you stretch out your legs in front of you, your arms above your head, and then stand up. He’s already stopped pretending to comb the beach and just watches you pick your way back along the rocky stepping stones with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Even the little things annoy you now.

“What do you want?” you demand instantly, as soon as your feet hit the soft sand. He wavers, and you frown at him. “Well?”

“Nothin’,” he says, and you must have looked like you were about to punch him because he quickly backpedals. “It’s just gettin’ dark.”

“So?”

Eridan blanches and kind of shifts his weight onto the other foot. “Nothin’,” he says again, and this time you let him get away with it.

Sometimes you feel bad about what you’re doing to him, but then you remind yourself he’s killed two people and you don’t feel bad at all. (Maybe you still do, a little, but you know you have no right to.)

Besides, the only reason he’s still alive right now is because you’re around. He should count himself lucky. You’ve confiscated his gun, the one he tried to give you as an ill-intentioned gift once upon a time, the blue one that shoots lasers, and you keep it buried in your sylladex where he can’t ever get at it. He has nothing but the ridiculous, flamboyant clothes on his back, and even though he has sharp teeth and a stronger body you have three guns and a hunting knife.

Eridan sags noticeably under your steady glare, and you turn around and start walking inland, back towards your home base. He follows you like a kicked puppy all the way, in complete silence.

Your ‘home base’ started off as a couple of hammocks as far away from each other as they could possibly get, on opposite ends of your little island hell. But one night you woke up to a wolf-like monster with a crackly growl and sharp teeth, and a terrified Eridan begging you to give him his gun back. You shot it yourself, and told him to go get his hammock and sleep near you from now on, even if you both hated the idea. You still think he was overreacting. It wasn’t much bigger than Bec.

Now, your hideaway has turned into an enclosure of outward-facing pointed poles jammed into the ground in a wobbly circle. You and Eridan carved them out of tree branches over the course of a week or so, and it does a pretty good job of keeping out the local fauna. Some of them are sharp enough to cut your finger on.

Eridan made his hammock first, out of some kind of long leaves he found. You swallowed your pride and asked him to teach you ( _told_ him to teach you) when you got sick of waking up with insects down your shirt. He told you he learned it from extended FLARP campaigns. You don’t know what those are, and you told him you don’t care, either.

A few minutes after you’re both in your hammocks, you hear him say, “’Night,” in a half-hearted voice. You don’t answer. You suspect he thought you were already asleep.

 

 _ampora_

You wake up with the sun, as always. Jade always wakes a little later, and so you put on your clothes, sit back on your hammock, and wait for her to wake up.

You tried to wake her up earlier, once, and suddenly you were staring down the business end of your own gun. You weren’t expecting her to have reflexes like that, and apparently neither was she, because it took her a second or two to realise it was you and not a wild animal, and then she put the gun back in her sylladex and just gave you an angry scowl. You left her alone after that.

It’s taken you a while to come to terms with the fact that she has every right to treat you like dirt. You killed two people who, really, only had your best interests in mind (you wince when you think like that. You were reluctant to admit it, because it meant you were in the wrong, and you weren’t sure if you could deal with what you did if you couldn’t justify it). But you understand now, and all your snark and superior curls of the lip and prickly defensiveness that you would have used to deal with Jade are no longer an option, because you don’t believe in any of it any more.

So you just take what she throws at you without complaint, like you’re dead on your feet, and do as she tells you. Some small part of you, angry and hot and buried, is ashamed of you for being so spineless.

The faint snoring sound fades out, and you pointedly pretend to be interested in the floor while Jade wakes up and slips out of her hammock. She doesn’t like you looking at her in the morning. She doesn’t like you looking at her anyway – but especially not in the morning, because she’s realised you’re right about wearing your clothes to bed in a climate like this, and she says she’s uncomfortable with you seeing her underwear, but neither of you have a choice.

You’re not comfortable with her seeing your boxers, either. Luckily she’s not a hypocrite about her own rule, and besides – you always wake first.

Jade nudges you sharply on the way past, and you slip out of your hammock to follow her. She’s the one with the weapons, the one who can actually defend you against something with a mouth like a chainsaw and eyes that glow white and a tail like a strip of cloth.

She leads you to the beach and you wordlessly step into the shallow water, then wade up to your chest and dive. You fish in the shallows while she goes to pick fruit along the coastline.

You experimented with swimming out to sea – you’d be able to make it to a continent, you thought, with a few rest stops along the way, and providing the fishing was equally as good all the way. But after swimming a little way out, the seabed dropped away below you, and the things that lived past that shelf were almost the same as Alternian deep-sea creatures, but with no troll population to keep them under wraps.

You returned in a hurry, and Jade took one look at the tooth stuck in your leg and just walked away. You patched yourself up as best you could, and found her sulking on the opposite shore an hour later. She told you not to swim off again, and you just sighed. You’re not _stupid._

There’s a muffled noise from above the water, and you surface just in time to see Jade hopping around on one foot and cursing in the shallows by some rocks further down the beach.

You watch her pause to examine the underside of her foot, and then curse loudly and call out, “Eridan!” That’s your cue. If she calls you by name, she’s in trouble, and if you don’t go when you’re called, you’re in worse trouble.

You think you might already know what happened, and the suspicion makes you high-tail it out of the water fast enough for your gills to burn, and you only slow to a jog when you’re close enough to ask what’s going on.

“I stepped on something,” she says, and now you know for sure. “It stings.”

“Lift your foot,” you tell her, and when she does, you hold it steady with one hand and examine it. “Sea urchin,” you say simply, and she frowns at you. “You wwon’t die. Bite your finger so you don’t bite off your stupid tongue.”

She hesitates, then crooks her finger and puts it in her mouth. You quickly pluck out two long, skinny spines (you’ve done it before – once for Feferi, and twice on separate occasions for yourself) and she hisses through her fist.

“Can you wwalk?”

“I think so.”

“Lean on me.”

She shoots you a dark look, but when you let go of her foot she nearly overbalances and you grab her upper arm. After a moment, she just makes an irritable noise and slings her arm over your shoulders.

You take her back to the camp and light the fire, even though it’s midday and the sun is making you both feel too hot for comfort, and she sits in her hammock dangling her injured foot and waits for you to tell her how to fix it.

You heat up some water in the smashed chassis-piece of a robot that Jade says was basically terrible, the only metal object either of you had in your sylladex that holds water, and then put it in front of her.

“Soak your foot in it,” you tell her, and she gasps because it’s almost too hot for her, but she steels herself and submerges her foot without another complaint.

“It hurts,” she says, like she’s accusing you of murder.


	2. Princess stories

_harley_

Sometimes, when you were a really little kid, you’d read books about princesses.

Some of them made you angry, in a way you couldn’t explain until later. You grew up self-dependent and strong, or so you like to think (you wouldn’t say this out loud, it would sound pompous) and you still don’t really get why princesses are always supposed to be rescued.

But even though they made you angry, you liked the stories. You kept coming back to them like a guilty pleasure, and sometimes after you stopped being a really little kid you’d still go to your shelf late at night and leaf through some of the classics, one by one.

Cinderella. Rapunzel. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White.

You used to think, secretly, in some tiny, hidden part of your mind, that maybe if you waited long enough, someone would come and sweep you off your feet like they knew what they were doing, and the stories would suddenly make a lot more sense. You’d say, _ohh, I get it,_ and your prince (whoever they were) would carry you bridal-style into the sunset.

You spent a long time hiding this from Rose, from her gentle probing and carefully-angled lines of questioning, but you always got the feeling she knew, in that quiet and cold way of hers; and then one day she managed to talk her way under your selflessness and steadfast independence, and she seemed wholly unsurprised by what she found there.

You told her about the stories and about princes and waiting and you think you apologised once or twice for being stupid, but Rose said she understood perfectly. She also said she read the same books.

You both agreed it was selfish, childish, and absolutely the thing wrong with fairytales. And then you went back to normal conversation, and carefully buried thoughts of princesses and rescuing under ten layers of conversation about whether Dave Strider was basically the prettiest most dinky princess you’ve ever seen. You laughed about that. Rose had a wonderful way of describing even the most ridiculous things to make them sound just a little bit true. She had a Way With Words.

And yet Dave Strider was almost your prince, once. You think about this as you limp your way along the shore with bare feet and chew quietly on a slightly-burnt fish skewered on a sharp stick.

You expected him to be stoic and subtle and brave-faced, and he was, in a way – but you hunted frogs together and he didn’t complain when you shoved one in his face and got a little too enthusiastic over how colourful and amazing it was, and he carried you over a muddy river once when the snows first started to melt. (You both fell in, because he was thirteen and the river was fast, but it was the first time you saw Dave Strider panic like that and the look on his face made you laugh, and when you both trudged out of the mud and collapsed on the bank a few minutes later, he apologised twice and then started laughing, too. You remember he carried you bridal-style up until the water swept his feet out from under him and you both splashed down.)

But he was trying too hard to be the prince, almost like he _knew,_ and that made you angry even though you never said so.

Eridan would be the same, you think, if you let him. You remember a freshly-resurrected Feferi quietly telling you why she cut off their exotic diamond-friendship with him, while you both sat and brushed each other’s hair, and gave yourselves a little time to be girls again and not ascended gods with the world on your plate.

She told you about the time he tried to defend her against a shark, all chest-puffing and enthusiasm and tenacity, and how she pushed past him and placed her hand right on its snout and it let her sit behind its dorsal fin. Feferi told of how he was always trying to defend her, to do things for her, when she just needed some open water!

You think she meant breathing space. That’s what _you_ miss, anyway. He’s been following you lazily in the shallows nearby, just under the water, and you wish he’d go away even though you know it’s your fault that he can’t.

If the tables were turned, and he was the one with the guns and the knives and the determination that lets you keep being a leader even if you don’t want to, you’re pretty certain he’d either kill you to get you out of the way or – and you can’t decide which you’d hate more – he’d treat you like a defenceless little girl who can’t look after herself.

The way he looks at you sometimes makes you think that’s how he feels anyway, even though you’re equipped and angry. He looked at you like that when you stepped on the sea urchin, disdainful and aloof because _he_ knew what to do and knew you’d be lost without him.

You bury away the part of you that says he’s right, in the padlocked space that holds the princesses and the high towers guarded by dragons, so that you can be angry about it in peace.

 

 _ampora_

You haven’t spent this much time in the water before in your whole life.

You wouldn’t, either, if it weren’t for Jade. In the days before you slept in the same camp, you’d wander along the shoreline and pick fruits just like she does now, and you got sick once or twice but you were satisfied because you know she threw up five times.

But when the wildlife started to seek you out because you couldn’t defend yourself, because _she’d_ taken your weapons (you still can’t bring yourself to ask for them back with any degree of sincerity because deep down you think _I’d do it again_ ), you moved your hammock and lived in her company, and she noticed the way you squirmed when your shirt clung to your gills and how your breaths came in short, stifled puffs that didn’t really leave you with enough air because if your ribs moved too much they burned.

She watched you suffer in silence for three days, and you were okay with that, because it meant you were allowed to think less of her even if you knew you didn’t actually deserve any attention. But then on the fourth day, she woke up a few minutes early and saw you with your hand up your shirt gingerly touching your gills because the hot, poisonous sting was almost like scratching an itch, and she confronted you with the thunderous look of a building storm and demanded to know what you were doing.

She asked you three times in slightly different ways before you let slip the real answer – that your gills were probably infected and what business was it of hers?

There was a flighty _something_ behind her eyes, there and gone in a flash, and it made your collapsing and expanding aquatic vascular system skip a beat and your gills burn a little more because of the way she sagged defeatedly, and then she quietly told you that you weren’t allowed to die.

You’ve always been a bad liar.

She wrestled the cure out of you, picking apart your irritable retorts and half-lies until she understood what to do, and you’re maybe a little grateful that she was so persistent because you’re not sure how much worse your gills would have gotten and the thought frightens you even though you’ve died before.

Jade took your wrist and marched you to the ocean, and when you protested she decaptchalogued your gun and jabbed it into your side and then pushed you all the way in up to your neck, and then she dunked you under until you gave up and relaxed, sinking to the bottom and sitting there, taking deep gulps of salt water into your gills until the sting and the itch and the burn intensified to a roar in your head.

Sea dwellers are designed to dwell in the fucking sea, she says angrily, when you surface an hour later and find her lying on her back on the soft, warm sand with one arm slung over her eyes. She doesn’t say a lot more after that, but she feels your uncertainty without even looking at you and just pats the sand beside her.

You both fell asleep there in the midday sun, and since that day she makes you go fishing for the both of you in the mornings, a flimsy excuse to make you dunk yourself in the water and keep yourself in good health.

Jade is angry at you all of the time in ways you don’t comprehend fully, and since you hate yourself and the world anyway you don’t care what she thinks of you as long as she thinks _something._ It’s your small trinket of truth that rubs up against your loneliness like sandpaper and reminds you in a sharp, rough way that you still exist.

But like the day you started being a sea dweller again, sometimes her vicegrip on her anger will slip a little, like she’s not used to being so angry all of the time (and you know deep down that she’s not, because in that short window of time when everyone was together she was happy and free and almost as bubbly as Feferi, and just as friendly to Karkat and Nepeta and the other humans). She’ll say or do something that lets you know the sandpaper she’s covered in never used to be there.

You’ve got your defences, too. Glass shards and bits of twisted metal and oily, sticky black tar, like a polluted beach, and when you think about what they really are, they’re shards of broken diamonds and the metallic bite of a chainsaw, and three shades of blood that you can’t quite wash off.

You always keep tabs on where she is. You’re sure it annoys her, and maybe that’s why you stick so close even in the daytime when the monsters are sleeping - because it makes her look at you and scowl. Right now you’re lying on your back in a warm rock pool, with your legs sticking out and crossed over each other on a rock heated by the sunlight. Jade is climbing trees, and if you narrow your eyes against the shimmering surface of the water and focus really hard, you can see the black smudge that is her hair and the tattered, faded sky-blue that she still calls her Eclectica Dress despite it being messed up beyond recognition at this point.

She’s sitting on a thick tree branch, and she’s watching you watching her. You hope you’re making her angry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you have anything to put in the comments i'd really appreciate your feedback, you guys are great
> 
> i will try and make sure they actually do something interesting soon and not just dick around thinking about stuff like huge nerds


	3. Savagery

_ampora_

You told her it’d be easier just to go round the whole island and wipe out the monsters, to save you the trouble of dealing with them when you don’t expect them.

Jade tells you that’s awful, and what about the baby monsters, did you ever think of them? You roll your eyes and say a baby monster is still a monster. She hums pointedly and says that a baby monster is still a baby. You’d argue, but she basically has you trained like a dog by now and arguing never ends well for you.

You take the fruit she hands you and nick its thick, hardened skin with one of your teeth, then turn it with both hands to score a deep line all the way around the outside. Jade has to use a knife for these. You pull it apart in your hands and it comes away in two jagged halves, and you scrape the soft flesh out of the inside with your teeth and eat it that way.

Her knife makes a cleaner cut, but as long as you get the thing open you don’t really care, even if it does make you feel a little savage sometimes.

It’s a psychological war game, living on an island with someone who has all the power and hates you for a hundred unexplained reasons. She makes you live like her inferior servant, doing all the odd jobs and only using your teeth and claws to get the job done, and you know it’s because she needs to feel like she knows what she’s doing somehow, and if she has someone to order around, someone who’s lesser than her, she can sleep a little easier at night. It’s not an unfamiliar story to you.

When you lie down in your hammock that evening, though, she hasn’t gone to sleep already like she usually does, all her weapons (and yours) tucked away in her sylladex. Jade sits in her hammock, swaying gently, with Ahab’s Crosshairs balanced on her crossed legs, staring at it.

You watch her over the edge of your hammock, trying to keep your eyes narrowed because they shine in the dark like a cat’s and she’ll detect the gleam sooner or later.

There’s an odd gleam to her eyes, too, and after a while she gets up and leaves camp, the rifle clutched to her chest like a doll. She thinks you’re still asleep.

You wait until she’s out of earshot, then slide out of your hammock and track her through the sparse trees with as much stealth as you can manage. Which you hope is quite a lot. You still remember FLARPing with Vriska and a lot of it was sneaking across decks and hiding behind masts with your cape clutched to your chest. You don’t have your cape any more, so it’s a little easier to stay hidden.

After a while, Jade holds the rifle out in front of her, and just squeezes the trigger enough to make the end heat up a little, giving off a faint bluish light. You’re a little bit surprised that she’s worked out how to do that already. Apparently she’s never used a laser rifle before, and it’s not exactly a feature that’s included in a manual anywhere. You hang back a little more so you don’t get caught in the light, and follow her all the way to the cove.

In the afternoons, when she’s done with her tasks for the day and she’s captchalogued enough fruit to last until tomorrow, she comes here to sit and think. There are a few boulders sticking out of the water like stepping stones, and at low tide they’re huge, but at high tide they’re just miniature islands sticking out of the waves. The last one is big enough to fit four people on it, but you never follow her, because you tried it once and you got about three out of five rocks along before she turned around and fired a warning shot at you from your own rifle and you slipped off into the water.

She’s learning how great your rifle is – long, long after you tried to convince her of its worth. She didn’t want it back then and you find it almost a mockery that she gets to keep it now. But at least she’s working out the finer details, like how if you don’t quite hold the trigger down far enough to shoot a beam the tip will give off heat and light – enough to find your way in the dark, and enough to make dry grass and twigs start to smoke.

She seems to like how it’s powered by sea water (or, more specifically, the salt), because that means it doesn’t take bullets or energy cartridges and it will never run out. But fresh water breaks it, and you don’t tell her how to fix it because that means she comes to you for help, and for a little while you can hold your own gun in your hands and even though she threatens to shoot you in the foot with one of her own rifles you always take just a little bit longer than you need to make it work again.

Jade hops from one jutting rock to another, reaching the last one and stumbling a little before dropping to a seated position and bringing her knees up to her chest. She hugs herself like that for a while, and with every moment that passes you’re getting more and more worried that something is going to creep up on you from behind and bite off your limbs, because you can hear things howling far off in the distance. But you hear something else, when you listen carefully, and it sounds like muffled hiccupping.

With a start you realise it’s Jade, and that she’s crying.

 

 _harley_

You wait until he’s asleep and you leave him behind, because you’ve worked out that it’s the only way you’re going to get to be alone, and he’ll follow you otherwise. Maybe a wolf monster will try to eat him while he’s sleeping and you’ll hear him dashing about and yelling and you’ll have to stop thinking and go back to shoot something.

But you make it to the cove and there’s not a sound except for faint catcalls and noises no Earth animal should be making, and it just serves to remind you that you’re not on Earth – you’re alone in the middle of a strange ocean that feels almost like the one around your island but a little hotter and a lot more savage.

You make it to the last rock before the tears start coming (you knew you were going to cry, that’s why you came all the way out here to be alone) and you sit down hard enough to bruise yourself a little and you just curl up and think about things that normally you don’t let yourself think about.

Like how all of your friends might be dead, because you and Eridan landed in the ocean hard enough to hurt and you have no idea if the others hit land instead of water. You miss John and Rose and Dave more than you’ve ever missed them in your life; you lived alone on an island, you remind yourself – you should be stronger. Except you weren’t alone, you had Bec, and for a short while you had Grandpa too, but the game ruined that for you as well (you try not to ever blame Tavros for what happened to your Grandpa. He’s too sweet and nervous and well-meaning, and he had a goofy smile with fangs that stuck out a lot like your buck teeth did, and when you met him you knew you couldn’t blame him, and you realise suddenly that you’re referring to him in the past tense and you cry a little bit harder).

You think about how you’re taking advantage of someone who’s dead inside to stop yourself from dying that way too, and how you never thought you’d be acting like you are now towards anyone, ever, but you can’t help it. You wonder if this is how Karkat feels, why he’s so loud and controlling and angry, because if he can’t hold himself together by curling up tight and putting out spikes he’ll fall apart.

You think about how you slapped around your sprite-self, and how you yelled at her and told her she was being an idiot despite the fact that really it was just _you,_ all along, and how that basically makes you a lot more like Karkat and his past and future selves than you ever bargained for, and what kind of a hypocrite that makes you.

And you think about how you miss your dog-ears, and your cool spacey powers and your Green Sun energies and your feeling of control, and how it all got stripped from you along with your God Tier just like everyone else’s when you opened the door and fell through the sky.

You think about how you miss your God Tier outfit, because it made you feel more like an adventurer, and how your tattered Eclectica dress makes you feel like a princess who fell out of her tower.

There are footsteps behind you. You’re not sure why you bothered, really.

 

 _ampora_

There are a pair of glowing white eyes watching you from the bushes, edging closer. The realisation sets in that you’re being stalked, and you weigh up your options.

Then you discover that you only really have two, and you pick the one that isn’t dying and sprint forwards to leap from one rock to the other. The beast yowls in frustration as you dance out of reach, but it’ll try and follow you if you give it time. You spur yourself along to the last rock.

Jade is already standing up with your rifle at the ready, gripping it in both hands (she doesn’t need to do that, _she’s holding it wrong_ ) and she squares her feet and the tip flashes into life with an electric crackle. The beast takes a hit square to the shoulder and that’s probably fatal, but with the energy it has left it flees in terror before she can get another clear shot.

“You followed me,” Jade says, but her nose is stuffy and her eyes are wet and she isn’t even angry – she just sounds fed up and tired, and you gesture to the shoreline.

“I wwas bein’ chased,” you snap. “You ain’t supposed to just up and fuckin’ leavve me in the middle of the night wwhen you got all the firepowwer, that wwasn’t part a’ the deal!”

She lowers the gun. You didn’t even notice that she was pointing it at you.

“If you’d stayed in the camp they wouldn’t be able to get you.”

You know she’s right – between the two of you, you’ve spiked out the whole fence and the poles are above head height, and that just leaves you to tell the truth. You keep your mouth shut. She waits for a long minute and then just turns and hops back towards the shore with an exasperated sigh.

You hurry to catch up and draw level to her as she heads back to camp, because you saw what she didn’t mean you to see and she expects you to forget about it, so it’ll be another way of getting under her skin. You tell yourself that’s your only reason.

“You wwere cryin’,” you mumble, and that’s as far as you got in your head. She just shrugs.

“People cry when they’re sad.” You don’t have anything to say to that, but it turns out she didn’t expect you to, because she’s talking again. “Your friends do, too.”

You know that’s basically her way of pointing out that _you don’t,_ but you’re not interested in that. “They’re not my friends.”

“They were.”

You frown. You don’t know how she even _dares_ to say that sort of thing as though she has any idea at all. You killed two of them. One of them killed you back. The others didn’t give a shit, and sometimes you think that might be the worst part.

“What about Karkat?”

“Wwhat about him?” you snap immediately. Jade just slowly shakes her head and shoots the ground a venomous look, as if you’re being stubborn. “Wwhat?”

You slip into single file, Jade in front, as you enter the camp. She motions to the ‘door’, a makeshift slab of wooden pikes haphazardly tied together with tree vines, and you drag it across to cover the entrance behind you.

You’re both lying in your hammocks and five minutes have passed before she breaks the silence again. It’s starting to feel like the most you’ve ever spoken to each other, not counting the time you tried to give her Ahab’s Crosshairs for the first time; you never really spoke to each other even before you were islandbound.

“I miss my friends.” You stay quiet for a while, not sure how to respond, and the silence stretches out between you like the ocean. “That’s why I was crying. Because I miss them.” She explains, after you’ve both been silent as the grave just long enough for it to start getting uncomfortable.

“Okay.” Your voice is quieter than you expected. You’re not sure if she heard, but after a moment she hums a soft reply and turns over onto her side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, comments are encouraged because they are how i know what to improve and what i'm doing wrong and what i'm doing right
> 
> @LoudVoice: sure i can do that, might be in the next chapter i think, we'll see how it turns out. i'll try and add all the little informationy bits in as i go along


	4. Fogged over

_harley_

You are Jade Harley, and you are not a monster.

You think this little mantra to yourself in the mornings, when you’re trying not to think about Eridan’s feelings (because you’re fairly certain he does have them, after all) and exactly what you might be doing to them.

You wish he’d fight back a little, show some zest; and maybe you could have a real argument with him and stop feeling like you’re beating a dead horse. You hate that expression. It sounds cruel, and you’re not a cruel person. You had a dog (god). You treated him well. You had friends and you loved them like family. You didn’t step on bugs and you used to save spiders from being stuck in the bath.

You’re sick of not feeling like Jade Harley, and so you go with him this morning to get water. He wasn’t expecting you to, and it’s written all over the glance he gives you when you draw level with him, but he doesn’t complain (he’s too afraid to, or maybe he just doesn’t have the spirit) and soon you reach the spring.

It’s a small one, the only thing remotely like a river that you’ve seen, and it’s about a foot wide and it stems from a little hill in the centre of the island. The water is clear and clean, and you think if it wasn’t for this you’d be dead by now.

You cup your hands in the water and splash it on your face, rubbing away the salt that could be from the sea, or from the sand, or (more likely) from when you were crying last night. Eridan washes out the metal container (a piece of your exploded Johnnytop – at least it’s finally useful for something) and fills it with clean water.

You move a little further downstream, and you both sit and wash your faces and hands, and then you look up with beads of water on your eyelashes and he’s sitting back on his haunches and watching you.

Your eyes meet and for a while neither of you moves. You just sit and stare like you’ve never looked at each other before, and after a while you glance at his scarf and back up, like you’re wondering if it’s okay to just look wherever, and he seems to relax.

You study each other from afar. You’ve tried to avoid looking at him, ever, and you hope he was doing the same, and maybe that’s true because you’re both examining each other’s clothes and hair and faces like you might not ever get another chance to be openly curious.

He looks away first, and after captchaloguing the container of water he stands up and dusts himself off with wet hands.

You stand too, a moment later, and you follow the stream all the way to the beach with Eridan in tow, and you both pretend you didn’t just have the weirdest oglefest that ever managed to stay just barely on the safe side of awkward.

 

_ampora_

You’re not sure where you stand with Jade Harley. She has been practically at your throat since you’ve been stuck here, and now after one night of crying her eyes out she’s letting you look at her without scowling and snapping, and sometimes she goes where you go, on purpose, without complaining that you’re too close.

You don’t even know if you like the change. Before, she ordered you about with a glasspaper temperament; it was a kind of kind of angry friction on a part of you that was already sore, and you won’t deny it was painful, but it was a constant. And sometimes you let yourself think about what you’d done to the trolls you knew and that glasspaper was like a punishment that you felt you deserved.

Now, though, she’s turned mysterious and quiet, does chores when you do them (not _with_ you, never _with_ you) and there’s a kind of foggy indifference over the things she says that used to be sharp-edged and commanding.

You’ve come to hate indifference, over the sweeps. More so when the game started, and it all escalated from there – although you don’t mean escalated, you mean _stagnated,_ because people didn’t care about your showy challenges and accusations and the way if you turned just right your cape would billow.

Jade leads you to the ocean, and she does what she always does – paddles in the shallows a little bit, sweeps her feet a little so the water kicks up in swathes, while you always just wade straight in through the waves and dive, so that she doesn’t give you angry looks and tell you to go catch fish before she catches you with her knife (she never looks very intimidating, but you follow her orders because you’ve seen her shoot a hole through a leaf at fifty paces and you’re too much of a coward to want to die again).

But she isn’t looking at you in that expectant way right now, she’s just shuffling water along the shoreline, and you think maybe today you’re excused.

You never got infections on Alternia. There were vaccines and cures and you lived where the storms were, violent and thunderous and the electrical air, and not on a too-hot island with no ship hive and no sopor.

You’re wondering why your sopor-deficient nightmares haven’t woken her up so far when you hear Jade call you over. You look up expecting to see her drowning or something, but she’s just standing there waiting for you.

“Wwhat?” you ask, when you’re close enough. Jade holds up a little shell, wide and flat.

“There are bigger ones that look like this, right? About the size of your hand.”

“Clam shells?”

“Okay.” She nods and drops the shell, making a circle with her forefingers and thumbs. “I found one about this big on the beach the other day, but I dropped it in the water when I was on the rocks.” Jade points to what you’ve come to know as her thinking place, the furthest stepping-stone out to sea and the only one that never quite gets uncovered with the tide.

“Get it yourself,” you say, half-expecting her to frown dangerously at you. She just shifts her weight uncomfortably and shakes her head.

“I don’t want to get my dress wet.”

“It’s a mess anywway,” you point out, and she punches your shoulder. You’ll admit, she has a strong arm on her.

“Just go get it for me!”

“It’s probably gone by noww.” You gesture wildly at the water. “Besides, it’s not fuckin’ poisonous. The wwater around there ain’t deep, either. Get it yourself.”

Jade looks exasperated, but for once she doesn’t pull out a gun, like she knows a shell is a ridiculous thing to argue over. “Fine,” she snaps, and then turns on her heels and jogs over to the rocks, splashing her way forwards.

You slowly make your way along the beach towards her as she reaches chest height and takes a deep breath, holding her nose and bobbing under. She emerges a few moments later, just as you were wondering if she’d need your help after all, and brandishes a white object that is probably a shell. You can’t really tell from this distance, not without your glasses – but you don’t dare to wear them any more, because you’re reduced to a single pair and if they break you can’t replace them.

Jade triumphantly stomps back to shore and scrapes tangled wet hair away from her eyes (you’re always surprised at how green they are; if she were a troll she’d have to be at least a few sweeps older to have eyes that vividly coloured) and she waggles the shell at you like a trophy.

“Knew I’d find it,” she says in an accusing tone that says you should have believed her from the start, and as she huffily sweeps past you and heads up the beach towards the warmer, drier sand you notice there’s a piece of seaweed in her hair.

You also notice that her dress is clinging to her, the material dripping and dark, and a small part of your mind clicks and you suddenly realise why she avoids going in the water.

Jade turns to face you and flops down on the sand with the shell in her lap, and then she looks up from her prize and her face takes on an odd expression. Because you’re staring at her – you don’t _mean_ to stare at her, it’s just the way her dress is stuck to her and that’s hardly your fault, and oh shit you’d better do something fast because things are turning very awkward very quickly.

You spin 180 degrees and glance around wildly as if you’ll magically find something that will help you. Something reminds you you’re only wearing your boxers (you don’t mean something, because you know exactly what reminded you) and then you impulsively wade into the sea until the cold water comes right up to your stomach.

 

_harley_

You’re kind of glad you didn’t wear your glasses today. All you saw was the blotch of grey and purple that was Eridan and you’re happy with not knowing the details, because you think you’ve worked out what happened – because it’s exactly what you were hoping _wouldn’t_ happen. You expected yourself to be angrier about it, but you’re not.

You think maybe you’d have had to go in the water sooner or later, just to make a point. You worry if this is going to become a problem when it rains and if you ever fall in the sea by accident. You hope not.

You lie back and put your shell over your eyes, like the kind of mask you’d wear to a masquerade ball if you were a princess, and you daydream about anything that isn’t related to Eridan being socially terrible or how all you can do is lie in the sun and hope your clothes dry out soon.

Eridan keeps his distance until an hour later, when you stand up and shake off the sand and start picking fruit. He trails after you then, quiet and sheepish, and you think maybe he hopes you didn’t realise. You sink your teeth into a piece of fruit, but then it suddenly hits you how stupid you both are, and you accidentally spray bits of fruit and laugh with your mouth full. It’s not attractive, in any sense of the word, but it’s the first time you’ve laughed since you came to the island, and it’s making you feel more like the Jade Harley you tell yourself you are every morning and less like a monster.

Eridan runs his hand through his hair and looks skyward in a way that suggests he’s embarrassed about the whole thing and that you’re really not helping.

You just laugh even harder, because you’re Jade Harley and not a monster, and because you still have a lot of growing up to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey LoudVoice i wrote in that thing that you wanted  
> but it kind of turned into jade harley laughing at boners  
> reasons why i should not be allowed to write


	5. Being someone else

_harley_

It’s a few days since you laughed about wet clothes and being teenagers, and Eridan has been gone for three hours.

You _think_ it’s been about three hours, anyway, because you’re not the _Of Time_ , Dave is, and you’re supposed to be the _Of Space_ but your God Tier peeled off you like a shell too big for a hermit crab when you stepped through that door, and now you just vaguely feel like you know where Eridan might be.

That’s okay, though, because _might be_ is better than having no idea at all. You like to know things.

Before the game, you woke up in your dreams and you read the clouds; your friends accused you of being psychic but you knew they’d be able to do that too, in time!

When it started, you gave yourself glasses that could see everything. You saw Dave, dead, more than once, and you saw Rose look into a white sphere and Go Dark. You saw a lot of awful things but at least you knew what was happening, and then there was a silver lining to the horrible game and you thought, _maybe after this we will all get to be together!! :D_

You don’t know where your friends are now.

But you think you know where Eridan is, and you compose yourself and march off to find him. You’re dead right, thankfully, and when you get to the lagoon on the other side of the island you hang back in the grass-covered dunes and wait.

The lagoon itself is only really a lagoon because the island curves around and in on itself just there, making a kind of crescent-shaped beach with the sea in the middle. The water is dark and you’re pretty sure it gets deep a lot closer to the shore than on the other side of the island.

Eridan is sitting in the middle, and the water only comes up to his waist, and you’re not sure how he’s doing it until you realise there must be a tall rock underneath him, like a spire in the very middle of the lagoon.

You’ve been sitting in the dunes with dry grass stems tickling your legs for about five minutes before you realise he probably isn’t going to do anything interesting for a while, so you get up and stretch in the sun, and you walk to the water’s edge and splash your foot in his direction. The noise makes him glance around, but when he sees it’s you he just turns back to staring out to sea.

He’s ignoring you, and that’s not okay. You’re gripped with a sudden determination, and it spurs you out towards him, crashing through the waves like a mad horse. You bound up and down a little too much because you’re busy thinking about the days you’d gallop along and try to keep up with Bec and you’d pretend to be a horse and Bec would outrun you by a mile, and _not_ about how dark the water in the lagoon is.

The sea dweller turns to watch your crazy half-breaststroke, half-doggy-paddle, and you probably look very silly because you’re bringing your legs up too high and not pushing down low enough, because _what if there are more sea urchins down there, or jellyfish, or sharks,_ and you remember the day a bedraggled and guilty-looking Eridan tracked you down in this very cove with a tooth in his leg. You start to panic, a little, and when your hand hits something cold and smooth you nearly freak out; it feels like shark, you’ve hit a shark and pissed it off and it’ll bite your arm off in three seconds flat.

It’s Eridan’s arm, actually. He leans away from you and regards you with an odd look, one that isn’t angry or disdainful but just coldly probing, and you stop splashing about and take deep breaths and hold onto the rock underneath the sea dweller, pressing both feet sideways against it so you don’t have to tread water and dangle them into the potentially jellyfish-infested gloom.

“It’s fucking cold in here,” you complain gruffly. This is the way you’d talk to Dave Strider, sometimes, in a kind of mockery of his plain and unenthusiastic tone of voice. It made Dave Strider smile when he tried his best not to, but Eridan doesn’t ever smile and it’s not a carefully-groomed poker face because you know what those look like. You try again, in your normal voice. “I thought you were a shark.”

“Wwhat do you wwant?” he barks suddenly. You look up at him and realise that _now_ he looks angry, and you’re not sure what your answer will be.

 

_ampora_

You do what you think she wants, for once, and you go off on your own even though you’re afraid of the beasts. You keep reminding yourself that it’s midday and they’re sleeping, and you’ll find somewhere they can’t follow.

So you swim out into the middle of the lagoon that Jade normally seems to avoid, and you find there’s a pillar of rock there, covered in seaweed and just under the surface, and you sit there on your rock throne like the lagoon belongs to you.

Except she follows you – splashing around in your waters and scaring away your fish, and clumsily punches your arm and clings to your rock and you remember why you came out here.

Because you’re angry at her. Inconceivably, irrationally, murderously angry.

And you’ve finally got it figured out – that when you’re feeling murderously angry you can’t be around other people, because you don’t know how to be angry without lashing out, and if you do that to her you will never ever get your weapon back and you’ll be torn apart by the animal with the chainsaw mouth.

“Wwhat do you wwant?”

Jade just looks at you like a hopbeast looks at a descending space-freighter, and doesn’t say anything.

You’re happy to fill the gap.

“You didn’t just followw me out here for no reason. You’vve been like a lord a’ the fuckin’ flies since wwe got here, and noww you’re pretendin’ nothin’ happened.”

Jade lets go of the rock, apparently choosing treading water over being too close. “Sorry,” she says simply, and your lip curls of its own accord.

“Fuck you.” That’s all you say, for a while, because you’re too white-hot enraged to explain why just saying _sorry_ isn’t an option. Your eyes are burning. “Fuck you for goin’ wwith me wwhen the door opened.”

She’s quiet for a long time, just kicking her legs enough to keep herself afloat.

When the game’s final door opened, John and Karkat agreed everyone would go through in pairs, in case everyone was separated. You have to admit, it was good foresight on their part.

But you didn’t care. You’d be better off alone, you thought, and when no one was looking you wandered over to the open door and tried to go through. But someone _had_ been watching, after all. Jade grabbed your wrist and held you back; _I’ll go with you,_ she said with a soft smile, and you watched her talk and argue her way through four different trolls (Karkat, Vriska, Sollux and you) and one human (the one with the pale hair and sunglasses) before John decreed that _everyone_ had to pair up – _and if everyone else has their partners or doesn’t want to go with eridan, then it might as well be jade. she can take care of herself, guys. don't worry about it!_

“I couldn’t let you go on your own,” she says, quietly.

“Yeah, wwell, I’m used to it. Maybe you should havve.”

Jade just shakes her head. “I’m not that kind of person. Not _really._ ” A beat. “And I’m sorry if I seemed that way until now.” She can tell you don’t quite believe her, and she lifts her hand out of the water and holds it out to you. “Come with me. We have to talk.”

 

_harley_

You’re worried that he might not follow you, because he ignores your hand completely, but then he slides forwards off the boulder and you both wind up swimming for shore together.

He makes it there long before you do, of course, and when the water finally gets shallow enough for you to stand up and wade to shore he’s already standing there with his arms folded and quite pointedly looking anywhere that isn’t at you.

You decaptchalogue the only other item of clothing you have, your Squiddle set, and you put on the jacket and you put the shoes back in your inventory (neither of you wear shoes any more, because you’re both in the ocean too much and you don’t want to wear out now what you might need later). Eridan still doesn’t look at you, but he seems to relax a little and you’re glad he’s learned his lesson at least.

You drop to your knees and settle on the dry sand, facing the sea. Eridan begrudgingly sits down beside you, and says “Start talkin’,” even though you both know he doesn’t have anywhere important to be. So you start talking.

“Okay. I want you to know it’s nothing… _personal._ ” He grunts irritably and you quickly forge ahead in case he’s planning on leaving. “Look, I just… I lost my head. I don’t know why I did it. I just got really, really angry, because – because if I didn’t get _angry_ I’d just get _sad_. I don’t want to be sad, Eridan, I get stupid when I’m sad. I know I do. Jadesprite was _awful._ ”

He brings his knees up to his chest and folds his arms over the top of them, glaring at the waves in front of him and hiding most of his face behind his sleeve. You’re not sure (you can never be sure, Eridan is just so hard to read) but you _think_ he might understand.

“So I just kept being angry instead of being sad, and I thought I’d be able to keep it up so I wouldn’t have to be sad ever but I can’t! I can’t do that to you, Eridan. I couldn’t do it to anyone. I feel _awful._ And I had to stop because I didn’t feel like _me_ any more.”

“So wwhy’d you do it for so long?” he drawls, like he doesn’t even expect an answer. One squeaks out of your lips anyway (you’re crying again, fuck everything).

“Because I don’t know where my friends are and they might all be dead and we could be stuck here forever!”

It all came out in one long, whiny breath and you hate yourself for crying right now because you sound _exactly like Jadesprite,_ and if you cry any harder you know you’re going to start making some noises that will annoy you and probably make Eridan want to slap you in the face so you bury your head in your hands and try to hold your breath.

“It’s happenin’ all ovver again,” you hear Eridan say, muffled by the sleeve in front of his mouth. His voice is small and hesitant. “Wwe’re stuck in a small area and wwe hate each other’s guts, and wwe’re gonna wwind up killin’ each other.”

You sniff, uncurl a bit, and dab at your eyes with your wrist. You don’t want him to be afraid of you any more. It makes you afraid of yourself. “I don’t hate you, Eridan.”

“Not like – _that –_ givve me some fuckin’ credit,” he stutters suddenly, making you jump. It takes you a moment to work out what he means, and then you rapidly shake your head.

“No – I didn’t _mean_ it like that! Shit. We’re really bad at this, aren’t we.”

You both look at each other, eyes wide and searching and afraid – _afraid,_ that’s a new one, you’ve seen Eridan looking flighty and shifty and pensive, and once you saw him looking terrified when a monster chased him to your camp, but you’ve never seen him looking plainly _afraid_ – and it reminds you that Eridan Ampora is just as much of a person as you are.

“I’m really sorry,” you tell him, while you’re staring each other down, and you _mean_ it.

Eridan’s orangey-yellow eyes study your own, and you don’t look away. “Yeah,” he concludes finally, “wwe’re fuckin’ terrible at this.”

You both look away at once and stare at the reddening horizon. Eridan uncurls and leans back on his elbows, and you put your hand on top of his and for just five minutes he lets you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is really terrible and i'm really sorry but at least now i have jade back on track (because for a while there she derailed into being basically the lord of the flies and i'm sure we were all getting sick of her being a huge ooc bitch)
> 
> comments telling me what you do and don't like about the story  
> will be really  
> really helpful to me  
> *double pistols and a wink*


	6. Like glass worn smooth

_harley_

The next day it feels as though a fog has lifted from your mind. When you look at Eridan you don’t feel guilty any more, and in the few moments you catch him looking at you he doesn’t seem quite as cold as he did; he’s a little more readable, expressive, like in apologising to him you’ve let him feel like a person again (you’ve made a vow never to forget that he is one, or anyone else for that matter).

But you still don’t quite trust him with a gun yet, and you should probably have known this would become a real problem eventually. You’re on the other side of the island when you hear a hoarse yell.

“Harley,” it says, urgently, and you hotfoot it in that direction and only slow down when you hear the sounds of snapping twigs and gravelly snarls.

“Eridan?”

A leafy plant whips you in the face and for a second you’re too stunned to acknowledge what’s going on, but then the stars clear and you’re faced with a huge, white beast with a raggedy tail pinning the sea dweller to the floor.

He makes a strangled sort of noise that probably would have been a cry for help if the beast wasn’t pressing his own arm down onto his neck, and the first thing you think of doing is leaping forwards and bashing it over the head with the first rifle that comes out of your sylladex (your hunting rifle – and fleetingly it crosses your mind how much you missed the feel of this thing).

Unsurprisingly, the creature immediately turns and clamps its teeth down on the end of the gun, tugging it like a chew-toy and ripping it out of your hands before you can react. The gun clatters to the floor, but Eridan seizes the moment to roll out from underneath the wolf-monster and scramble to his feet.

“Harley, _the gun,_ ” he yaps, and dives for it as the monster whirls around to tackle you. It occurs to you that you’re an easier target – a little weaker, slower, and the beast figures this out when you don’t have enough time to dodge and it slams you to the ground.

You just about lose it, because this thing has teeth like a fucking shark and it’s snapping at your face.

You hear a gunshot.

 _“Movve!”_ Eridan roars, as the creature shudders to one side and makes a horrific grating noise that might have been a snarl if it was anything you’d find on Earth. You hurriedly claw at the ground to crawl out of the way, just as a heavy paw connects with the rifle and sends it spiralling into a tree.

The sea dweller gives an exasperated, almost animal-like growl upon realising he has no other choice, and pounces forwards. There’s a flash of white teeth and then the monster is bleeding from a gash on its shoulder as well as the bullet hole in its side from earlier.

You pull out another gun and the whine of energy tells you it’s the harpoon-laser-legendary-piece-of-shit. You have to angle for a clear shot for several seconds before Eridan leaps back from the fray. You squeeze the trigger, and Becquerel crashes to the floor.

 _Not Bec,_ you tell yourself, _never ever Bec,_ and Eridan collapses beside you and for a moment you both just sit there panting.

Your mind is still racing, but if anything it just makes you confused faster. You’re staring at what you think is artificial grape juice on your arm and wondering where it came from when you hear Eridan sigh heavily and lean against your shoulder.

“Eridan?”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and when he tries to get up he just slides down your side a little further. “Shit.”

“What are you-?” You risk a glance round at him, and you suddenly realise where the grape juice is coming from. It’s running down his sleeve and seeping through onto your dress and you know enough about trolls to at least deduce that it shouldn’t be coming out of his shoulder.

You flinch away involuntarily and Eridan swears as he finds himself on the floor.

 

 _ampora_

As you’re picking yourself up, putting your weight on your uninjured arm, the image of a culling drone flashes through your mind briefly; and even though you’re not hurt quite that badly and you’re not on Alternia right now it still takes you a little while to dismiss it.

You need to rest for a little while (not fall asleep, never ever fall asleep or Vriska will take all your loot and anyway you might die) and your head falls back a little, the sharp corner in the middle of your left horn digging into the bark of the tree behind you.

Then there’s a dull thud of pain in your injured shoulder as someone carefully wedges right up against you, and then there are hands fussing over your shirt. You bat at Jade with one hand.

“Eridan, let me do this.” You meant to object, but when you think about it, you’re not sure you could fix yourself up so well with only one working arm. You let your hand drop into your lap, and Jade unwinds your scarf and hangs it on a low branch.

You wonder if she’s ever seen gills before, and apparently she hasn’t because when she lifts the black material up over your chest there’s a pause and you think you hear a quiet gasp.

But she continues anyway, and you manage to lift your arms over your head so she can take off your shirt (it snags on your horns, and you’re thankful she avoids touching them directly when she picks it loose) and then she pulls you into her lap, the back of your head nestled in the ruffles of her skirt. You resisted for all of three seconds. It’s more comfortable than the floor, at least, even though you suspect the points of your horns are jabbing her in the stomach. She doesn’t seem to mind.

“I read books on first aid,” she says, and it’s like she’s speaking right into your ear even though she’s above you. “I’ve never tried it on anyone else though. I never had the chance.”

“Just don’t go anywwhere,” you mutter. There’s a ripping sound from just to your left and a piece of blue material flutters over your head. She binds it tight around your shoulder (a little too tight, maybe, but you don’t want to bleed to death) and then repeats the whole thing. She’s not going to have much dress left by the time she’s done.

“I can’t carry you back to camp, you’re too heavy,” she says, “but I don’t want to be here all night.”

“Don’t you dare leavve me here.” It was supposed to sound authoritative and threatening, but it comes out as a plaintive murmur and you wince slightly.

“I won’t! I meant, can you move?” She ties the final knot in the faded blue material and you test yourself by trying to sit up. You make it about halfway, and for a second you think you’re going to fall back and impale her on your horns but then her hands push gently on your back and you settle into an upright position.

“Yeah. If I can stand up.” You’re hesitant to ask for help, but she steps over to your good side and crouches, so you gingerly rest your arm on her shoulders and try not to flinch when she puts her hands around your sides, and when you stand up most of your weight is on her.

Jade supports you on the long walk back to camp, and she sits you down on your hammock and gets you a drink and you think she looks more comfortable doing these things than she’s ever looked bossing you around and pointing guns at you.

“You’re really cold, you know,” Jade points out. You shrug with your good shoulder.

“You’re ridiculously wwarm.”

She nods, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, well. Should it be that different?” Jade blows her hair out of her eyes, and then continues. “You’re not shivering, that’s all. I was wondering if we should start worrying.”

You can sort of see her point, but you don’t _feel_ cold, and then you’re thinking about how deep red her blood is when she grazes her knees or cuts her fingers, and it all kind of falls into place.

“I’m a royalblood. Wwe’re colder-blooded than evveryone else.”

Apparently you said something profound, because Jade thinks for a moment and then looks at you with a bright curiosity. “So that’s why you sit so close to the fire at night!”

You blanche and look away.

Jade just chuckles. She has a pleasant laugh, all things considered, but it sounds nothing like Feferi’s (which, come to think of it, suits you just fine).

“I can light one for you now, if you like.” You glance at her, measuring the way she’s looking at you, but she doesn’t seem to be sarcastic about it and there’s a faint smile on her face, so you shrug again.

“Okay,” you say simply, and Jade shuffles out of her hammock to fetch firewood almost immediately.

An hour later, you’re both sitting by a small fire. She brought her rifle back with her, too, and your shirt and scarf, and you’ve put them both back on and you’re starting to warm up. Jade lies back on the sparse grass and watches you upside-down.

“This is how I should be all the time,” she murmurs. You glance at her and she smiles apologetically. “You got to know the worst part of me first. Sorry.”

“Stop apologisin’ for that,” you tell her. “It’s unbecomin’.”

She just smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow am i bad at action scenes or w h a t  
> yep mmhm this is still going


	7. Memory like a shadow

_harley_

Sometimes you’ll pretend you’re on a gameshow. You’ve been parachuted onto this specially-prepared island and there are secret cameras, and you’ve got to learn to live with the guy who looks a little like a shark and on another island somewhere nearby there is another couple of people, and you’re in teams.  You don’t know the name of the show you’re talking about, but you’ve seen clips from it on the internet back when things were normal (you think John or one of the others would have known, but they’re not here).

It’s comforting to pretend that you’re both being watched by a camera crew and a whole nation or two. If anything goes really wrong they’ll send helicopters and take you home.

“We’re like a TV show,” you tell Eridan one time. He glances at you for half a second, then back down at the fruit he’s cutting up. You let him have the hunting knife a little while ago, and he hasn’t put it down since. You think he's glad to have some kind of tool, and not to be reduced to just his teeth and claws. “Like we’re secretly being filmed, living on an island, and people are giving us scores.” You dip your wrist into a rock pool and let a cherry-red anemone stick its tentacles on your fingertips. "We'd make for some pretty funny TV, I think."

“Are you sayin’ that ‘cause you wwant to get rescued?” he asks. You shrug, but it’s clear to both of you that you’re not very good at being vague. You're annoyed that he called you out so fast. “Wwell, stop.”

“Stop wanting to get rescued?”

“Wwant all you like. Just don’t bother… thinkin’… that you might.”

For a second there, it’s like he couldn’t find the words, and you think you know why. Eridan steals a glance at you when he thinks you’re not looking, then his fins kind of flag a little bit and he gets to his feet, popping a little block of cut fruit into his mouth, and starts walking away.

“Hoping,” you say, raising your voice just a tad so he can hear you. “You were gonna say hoping.”

“An’ you’re spacin’ out,” he snaps. It’d be a funny word pun, and you kind of _were_ spacing out a little bit. But he’s being spiteful and you think you’ve hit a nerve, and you know if you let him go off on his own (like he sometimes does now that he has the knife, like it’s a source of courage or something) you’ll be annoyed at each other for hours. So you get up and stroll after him, and put on a cheerful front.

“That was a good one,” you chime. He ignores you, but he’s not walking any faster or changing direction so at least you know he’ll let you walk with him for now. You don’t want to push your luck, so you change the subject. Kanaya told you, a long time ago – _Do Not Talk To Eridan About Hope_ – so, for now, you don’t. “Do you think your shoulder is healing okay?”

“Trolls heal fast.” Eridan instinctively rolls his shoulders as a test and then nods. Then he says, “You don’t knoww a wwhole lot about us, do you?”

You shrug off the accusatory tone with little trouble. “Not a lot! Karkat sort of told us a little, but… he’s not very clear, y’know?”

“Kar’s easy enough to read wwhen you knoww howw.”

“I know! Hehe, he is such an open book.” You miss him. A lot. “Were you two close?”

Eridan shrugs. That’s not a yes or no. That’s not even an _answer._ “He didn’t talk about you,” you say. “Karkat had something to say about everyone else but he only mentioned you once and I had to ask.”

Eridan tries very hard not to look interested, but his fins betray him by perking up a little on the sides of his face, like a cat listens for a bird. You aren’t sure if they actually help him hear. Maybe you’ll ask later.

“I didn’t know you. You were the only troll I hadn’t talked to! But you looked like you wanted to be left alone, so I asked Karkat first. And he said -” You clear your throat. Eridan jumps when you start yelling. “- _DON’T ASK ABOUT HIM,HARLEY, JUST LET SLEEPING BARKBEASTS LIE,_ ”you shout, trying to make your voice as hoarse and crackly as Karkat’s (but no human can make that noise, you’ve tried before). Eridan looks at you. “But like we just said, he’s easy to read. He looked kind of sad.”

The seadweller shakes his head. “Disappointed. Not sad.” You blink. “He looked disappointed.” You didn’t realise Eridan had been there. He didn’t have a lot of presence about him, though Kanaya told you that wasn’t unprecedented.

There’s a long pause. “I guess this might explain it better to you. Me and Vvantas used to bitch about evveryone.” Eridan draws to a halt beside a rock jutting out of the sand, and leans against it, looking out to sea. You stand just in the surf and watch the ripples around your feet. “Wwe’d stay up late talkin’ about trolls wwe kneww. An’ romance,” he adds a little stiffly. “Kar understood it better than most. He predicted Tavv and Vvris before it happened.”

You nod. “I used to talk to Rose until it was light outside. We’d talk about our friends too, but we didn’t talk about romance very much. Just other girly stuff. Once we talked about princesses,” you say before you can stop yourself. You laugh nervously.

Eridan doesn’t look at you, but he frowns at the horizon and looks like he’s thinking it over. “Princesses?”

Well, you’re kind of going to have to explain yourself now. Good skills, Harley. “…I, um, we used to want to be princesses when we were kids. Most little human girls do! It was a long time ago,” you insist. “I don’t any more. And don’t tell Rose I told you. It was kind of supposed to be just between us.”

Eridan finally looks at you, and you can’t look away fast enough so you get roped into looking back at him and you both just stand there while he studies your face.

You’re getting nervous. It occurs to you that Feferi was technically a princess, and you remember what he did to her and you can tell by the way he’s looking at you that he made the connection long before you did. Probably when the word ‘princess’ first sneaked past your lips.

You think you might wilt under his stare but then he looks away just as suddenly and says, “You’re nothin’ like a princess.”

What he means is you’re nothing like _her._ You liked Feferi a whole lot, but you’re still glad. At least, you hope that’s what he means, and that he doesn’t mean you’re not pretty enough. You don’t push for clarification, because if that was it you might have to hit him.

 

_ampora_

You dream you’re back on Derse.

You can tell it’s a dream and not the real thing because Derse is a distant memory that you never really _looked_ at in the first place; and so the streets curl back over themselves like loops of ribbon, and the sky is bright, painful white and writhing with angels. You don’t know how the ground can be so dark and shadowy when the sky is so blinding.

The black figures lining the roads aren’t really Dersites, either. They’re shadow people, with glowing white eyes, the essence of what Dersites _seemed_ to be to you – watchers, waiting for something, all of them making noises like a thousand seashells held up to your ears. Whenever you turn to look at one imperfect shadow it suddenly doesn’t have eyes and the others all stare harder.

When the looping roads snake around to make the walls of a coliseum and your teammates start moving towards you out of side-streets and doorways, claws and teeth glinting in the light of the angels, you know what’s coming. There’s some variation on this every night.

This time, Karkat gets to you first.

\---

You wake up on the floor with your legs above you, tangled in your hammock, angry and full of adrenaline and feeling like you’re under attack. Your blood pusher is going at a mile a minute, and you have to lie there for a few seconds just trying to slow your breathing and work out if you made any noise, because some tiny part of your think-pan is still functioning like a rational troll.

Whether you did or you didn’t, the silence reassures you that Jade slept right through your night-terrors, just as she does every time. That girl sleeps like a log, and some small part of you is envious.

You sigh and open your eyes, then immediately shut them again because holy _shit_ you were not expecting her to be that close.

“Sorry,” she says, sniffing wetly and taking a step back. “Sorry. I got scared.”

“Didn’t think you’d be awwake.”

When you open your eyes again she’s standing a little way off and wiping her eyes with the flesh of her palms. There’s a dark streak running down over her lips that tells you she has a nosebleed. “You started screaming, and I woke up.”

You disentangle your legs and they flop to the ground, and you sit up. The rush of blood makes you dizzy, or maybe it was the nightmare; you immediately draw your knees up to your chest and rest your forehead on them, taking a deep breath. It’s a very defensive posture and you’re self-conscious about that, but Jade doesn’t seem like the type to call you out on it and anyway if you sit up properly you’ll collapse.

“I didn’t say anythin’, did I?”

Jade takes a moment to respond, and that more or less gives you your answer anyway. “Sort of. I couldn’t make it out. You were screaming too much.”

“Ok,” you reply. At least it was ambiguous.

“I tried to wake you up but you just curled up and then I tried again and you bit my hand – and I freaked out but you wouldn’t let go – and then _you_ freaked out, and you punched me and fell on the floor.”

“Sorry,” you snap, just trying to shut her up more than anything else, and you get to your feet. Jade has her hand pressed against her face like she facepalmed with glue on her fingers, and there’s an angry-looking patch of marks on her hand in a perfect crescent shape. You run your tongue over your teeth and taste iron. “Happens evvery night. Just leavve me alone next time.”

Her eyes widen, and there’s a look in them that screams _pity,_ which almost makes you want to puke or something because you’ve been down this road before.

Neither of you can get back to sleep, so you sit around the embers of the dying fire and you both talk about anything that isn’t your nightmare. By dawn Jade is explaining a movie about a hundred and one spotted barkbeasts to you, and neither of you have any idea how you got there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this chapter took so long! i had my laptop confiscated since the 5th of january and only recently got it back. also sorry if this chapter is written kind of shoddily! i actually had to go back and re-read most of the fic to try and remember where i was because my flow got totes interrupted, fuckin unconscionable  
> ugh i really don't like how this one came out  
> tomorrow they will DO SOMETHING INTERESTING (possibly)
> 
> i will be coming back to the night terrors thing again later probably. there is more to squeeze out of it :]
> 
> suggestions welcome i guess, since i totally lost my train of thought when i was computer-deprived

**Author's Note:**

> hi i don't know what i'm doing
> 
> hope you like erijade


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